world, have long been steadily on the wane. Years and years ago he
ceased to retain the faintest gleam of the halo of romance that once
was, despite of himself, thrown around him. His people care little or
nothing for him. Why, indeed, should they care anything? The military
_prestige_ which he had won, such as it was, vanished at Custozza, and
it was his evil destiny, hardly his fault, to be almost always placed in
a position of antagonism to the one only Italian who since Cavour's
death had an enthusiastic following in Italy. Aspromonte was a calamity
for Victor Emanuel. One can hardly blame him; one can hardly see how he
could have done otherwise. The greatest citizen or soldier in America or
England, if he attempted to levy an army of his own, and make war from
American or English territory upon a neighboring State, would surely
have seen his bands dispersed and found himself arrested by order of his
government; and it would never have occurred to any one to think that
the government was doing a harsh, ungrateful, or improper thing. It
would be the necessary, rightful execution of a disagreeable duty, and
that is all. But the conditions of Garibaldi's case, like the one
splendid service he had rendered, were so entirely abnormal and without
precedent, the whole thing was from first to last so much more a matter
of national sentiment than of political law, that national sentiment
insisted on judging Garibaldi and the King in this case too, and at
least a powerful, passionate minority declared Victor Emanuel an ingrate
and a traitor. Mentana was almost as bad for the King as Custozza. The
voice of the country, so far as one could understand its import, seemed
to declare that when the King had once ordered the Italian troops to
cross the frontier, he should have ordered them to go on; that if they
had actually occupied Rome, France would have recognized accomplished
facts; that as it was, Italy offended France and the Pope by stepping
over the barrier of the convention of September, only to humiliate
herself by stepping back again without having accomplished anything.
Certainly the policy of the Italian Government at such a crisis was
weak, miserable, even contemptible. Then indeed Italy might well have
exclaimed, "Oh for one hour of Cavour!" One hour of the man of genius
and courage, who, if he had moved forward, would not have darted back
again! Perhaps it was unfair to hold the King responsible for the
mistakes of his ministers. But when a once popular King has to be
pleaded for on that sole ground, it is pretty clear that there is an end
to his popularity. So with Victor Emanuel. The world began to forget
him; his subjects began to despise him. Even the thrilling events that
have lately taken place in Italy, the sudden crowning of the national
edifice--the realization of that hope which so long appeared but a
dream--which Cavour himself declared would be the most slow and
difficult to realize of all Italy's hopes--even the possession of Rome
hardly seems to have brought back one ray of the old popularity on the
heavy head of King Victor Emanuel. Again the wonderful combination of
good luck and bad--the good fortune which brought to the very door of
the house of Savoy the sudden realization of its highest dreams--the
misfortune which allowed that house no share in the true credit of
having accomplished its destiny. What had Victor Emanuel to do with the
sudden juncture of events which enabled Italy to take possession of her
capital? Nothing whatever. His people have no more reason to thank him
for Rome than they have to thank him for the rain or the sunshine, the
olive and the vine. The King seems to have felt all this. His short
visit to Rome, and the formal act of taking possession, may perhaps have
been made so short because Victor Emanuel knew that he had little right
to claim any honors or expect any popular enthusiasm. He entered Rome
one day and went away the next. I confess, however, that I should not
wonder if the visit was made so short merely because the whole thing was
a bore to the honest King, and he could only make up his mind to endure
a very few hours of it.
Victor Emanuel, King of United Italy, and welcomed by popular
acclamation in Rome--his second son almost at the same moment proclaimed
King of the Spaniards--his second daughter Queen of Portugal. How
fortune seems to have delighted in honoring this house of Savoy. I only
say "seems to have." I do not venture yet to regard the accession of
King Amadeus to the crown of Spain as necessarily an honorable or a
fortunate thing. Every one must wish the poor young prince well in such
a situation; perhaps we should rather wish him well out of it. Never
king assumed a crown with such ghastly omens to welcome him. Here is the
King putting on his diadem; and yonder, lying dead by the hand of an
assassin, is the man who gave him the diadem and made him King! But for
Juan Prim there would be no Amadeus, King of the Spaniards; and for that
reason Juan Prim lies dead. The young King must have needed all his
hereditary courage to enable him to face calmly and bravely, as he seems
to have done, so terrible a situation. Macaulay justly says that no
danger is so trying to the nerves of a brave man as the danger of
assassination. Men utterly reckless in battle--like "bonny Dundee" for
example--have owned that the knowledge of the assassin's purpose and
haunting presence was more than they could endure. The young Italian
prince seems to have shown no sign of flinching. So far as anything
indeed is known of him, he is favorably known to the world. He bore
himself like a brave soldier at Custozza, and obtained the special
commendation of the Austrian victor, the gallant old Archduke Albrecht.
He married for love a lady of station decidedly inferior to that of a
royal prince; the lady had the honor of being sneered at even in her
honeymoon for the modest, inexpensive simplicity of her toilet, as she
appeared with her young husband at one of the watering-places; he had
not made himself before marriage the subject of as much scandal as used
to follow and float around the bachelor reputation of his elder brother
Humbert. He is believed to be honestly and manfully liberal in his
views. He ought to make a good King as kings go--if the murderers of
General Prim only give him the chance.
As I have mentioned the name of the man whose varied, brilliant, daring,
and turbulent career has been so suddenly cut short, I may perhaps be
excused for wandering a little out of the path of my subject to say that
I think many of the American newspapers have hardly done justice to
Prim. Some of them have written of him, even in announcing his death, as
if it were not possible for a man to be honest and yet not to be a
republican. In more than one instance the murder of Prim was treated as
a sort of thing which, however painful to read of, was yet quite natural
and even excusable in the case of a man who endeavored to give his
country a King. There was a good deal too much of the "Sic semper
tyrannis" tone and temper about some of the journals. Now, I do not
believe that Prim was a patriot of that unselfish and lofty group to
which William the Silent, and George Washington, and Daniel Manin
belong. His was a very mixed character, and ambition had a large place
in it. But I believe that he sincerely loved and tried to serve Spain;
and I believe that in giving her a King he honestly thought he was doing
for her the thing most suited to her tendencies and her interests. If
Prim could have made Spain a republic, he could have made himself her
President, even perhaps for life; while he could not venture, she being
a kingdom, to constitute himself her King. Many times did Prim himself
say to me, before the outbreak of his successful revolt, that he
believed the republican to be the ultimate form of government
everywhere, and that he would gladly see it in Spain; but that he did
not believe Spain was yet suited for it, or numbered republicans enough.
"To have a republic you must first have republicans," was a common
saying of his. New England is a very different sort of place from Old
Castile. At all events, Prim is not to be condemned as a traitor to his
country and to liberty, even if it were true that he could have created
a Spanish republic. We have to show first that he knew the thing was
possible and refused to do it, for selfish or ignoble motives. This I am
satisfied is not true. I think Prim believed a republic impossible in
the Spain of to-day, and simply acted in accordance with his
convictions. He came very near to being a great man; he wanted not much
of being a great patriot. He was, I think, better than his fame. As
Spain has decreed, he "deserved well of his country." It seems hardly
reasonable or just to decry him or condemn him because he did not
deserve better. Such as he was, he proved himself original. "He walked,"
as Carlyle says, "his own wild road, whither that led him." In an age
very prolific of great political men, he made a distinct name and place
for himself. "Name thou the best of German singers," exclaims Heine with
pardonable pride, "and my name must be spoken among them." Name the
half-dozen really great, originating characters in European politics
during our time, and the name of Prim must come in among them.
But I was speaking of Victor Emanuel and his children. All I have heard
then of the Duke of Aosta leads me to believe that he is qualified to
make a respectable and loyal constitutional sovereign. High intellectual
capacity no one expects from the house of Savoy, but there will probably
be good sense, manly feeling, and no small share of political
discretion. In the Duke of Aosta, too, Spain will have a King who can
have no possible sympathy with slave systems and their products of
whatever kind, and who can hardly have much inclination for the coercing
and dragooning of reluctant populations. If Spain in his day and through
his influence can get decently and honorably rid of Cuba, she will have
entered upon a new chapter of her national existence, as important for
her as that grand new volume which opens upon France when defeat has
purged her of her thrice-accursed "militaryism." The dependencies have
been a miserable misfortune to Spain. They have entangled her in all
manner of complications; they have filled her with false principles;
they have created whole corrupt classes among her soldiers and
politicians. General Prim himself once assured me that the real revenues
of Spain were in no wise the richer for her colonial possessions.
Proconsuls made fortunes and spread corruption round them, and that was
all. If her new King could only contrive to relieve Spain of this source
of corruption and danger, he would be worth all the cost and labor of
the revolution which gives him now a Spanish throne.
Why did fate decree that the very best of all the children of Victor
Emanuel should have apparently the worst fortune? The Princess Clotilde
is an exile from the country and the palace of her husband; and if the
sweetness and virtue of one woman might have saved a court, the court of
the Tuileries might have been saved by Victor Emanuel's eldest daughter.
I have heard the Princess Clotilde talked of by Ultramontanes,
Legitimists, Orleanists, Republicans, Red Republicans (by some among the
latter who firmly believed that the poor Empress Eugenie was wickeder
than Messalina), and I never heard a word spoken of her that was not in
her praise. Every one admitted that she was a pure and noble woman, a
patient wife, a devoted mother; full of that unpretending simplicity
which, let us own it frankly, is one of the graces which very high birth
and old blood do sometimes bring. The Princess must in her secret soul
have looked down on some of the odd _coteries_ who were brought around
her at the court of the Tuileries. She comes of a house in whose
genealogy, to quote Disraeli's humorous words, "Chaos was a novel," and
she found herself forced into companionship with ladies and gentlemen
whose fathers and mothers, good lack! sometimes seemed to have omitted
any baptismal registration whatever. I presume she was not ignorant of
the parentage of De Morny, or Walewski, or Walewski's son, or the Jerome
David class of people. I presume she heard what every one said of the
Countess this and the Marchioness that, and so on. Of course the
Princess Clotilde did not like these people--how could any decent woman
like them?--but she accepted the necessities of her position with a
self-possession and dignity which, offending no one, marked the line
distinctly and honorably between her and them. Her joy was in her
children. She loved to show them to friends, and to visitors even whom
she felt that she could treat as friends. Perhaps she is not less happy
now that the ill-omened, fateful splendors of the Palais Royal no longer
help to make a gilded cage for the darlings of her nursery. Of the whole
family, hers may be called the only career which has been doomed to what
the world describes and pities as failure. It may well be that she is
now happiest of all the children of the house of Savoy.
Meanwhile, Victor Emanuel has been welcomed at the Quirinal, and is
indeed, at last, King of Italy. We may well say to him, as Banquo says
of Macbeth, "Thou hast it all!" Lombardy, Tuscany, Parma, Modena, the
Two Sicilies, Venetia, and Rome--what gathering within less than a fifth
of an ordinary lifetime! And on the Quirinal Victor Emanuel may be said
to have stood alone. Of all the men who mainly wrought to bring about
that grand consummation, not one stood by his side. Daniel Manin, the
pure, patient, fearless, patriot hero; Cavour, the consummate statesman;
Massimo d'Azeglio, the Bayard or Lafayette of Italy's later days, the
soldier, scholar, and lover of his country--these are dead, and rest
with Dante. Mazzini is still a sort of exile--homeless, unshaken, seeing
his prophecies fulfil themselves and his ideas come to light, while he
abides in the gloom and shadow, and the world calls him a dreamer.
Garibaldi is lending the aid of his restless sword to a cause which he
cannot serve, and a people who never understood him; and he is getting
sadly mixed up somehow in ordinary minds with General Cluseret and
George Francis Train. Louis Napoleon, who, whatever his crimes, did
something for the unity of Italy, is a broken man in captivity. Only
Victor Emanuel, least gifted of all, utterly unworthy almost to be named
in the same breath with any of them (save Louis Napoleon alone)--only he
comes forward to receive the glories and stand up as the representative
of one Italy! Let us do him the justice to acknowledge that he never
sought the position or the glory. He accepted both as a necessity of his
birth and his place, a formal duty and a bore. His was not the character
which goes in quest of greatness. As Falstaff says of rebellion and the
revolted English lord, greatness "lay in his way, and he found it."
LOUIS ADOLPHE THIERS.
Guizot quietly at work in the preparation of a history of France for the
instruction of children--Thiers taking his place in a balloon to fly
from one seat of government in France to another! Such were the
occupations, at a given time in last November, of the two distinguished
men whose rivalries and contentions disturbed the politics of France for
so many years.
An ill-natured person might feel inclined to say that the adventures in
the balloon were a proper crowning of the edifice of M. Thiers's fitful
career. Was not his whole political life (_non meus hic sermo_, please
to understand--it is the ill-natured person who says this) an enterprise
in a balloon, high out of all the regions where common sense,
consistency, and statesmanship are ruling elements? Did he not overleap
with aeronautic flight when it so suited him, from liberalism to
conservatism, from advocating freedom of thought to enforcing the
harshest repression? Was not his literary reputation floated into high
air by that most inflated and gaseous of all balloons, the "History of
the Consulate and the Empire"? Thiers in a balloon is just where he
ought to be, and where he ever has been. Condense into one meagre little
person all the egotism, all the self-conceit, all the vainglory, all the
incapacity for looking at anything whatever from the right point of
view, which belong to the typical Frenchman of fiction and satire, and
you have a pretty portrait of M. Thiers.
Doubtless, the ill-natured person who should say all this would be able
to urge a good many plausible reasons in justification of his
assertions. Still, one may be allowed to admire--one cannot help
admiring--the astonishing energy and buoyancy which made M. Thiers,
despite his seventy-three years, the most active emissary of the French
Republic during the past autumn, the aeronautic rival of the vigorous
young Corsican Gambetta, who was probably hardly grown enough for a
merry-go-round in the Champs Elysees when Thiers was beginning to be
regarded as an old fogy by the ardent revolutionists of 1848. About the
middle of last September, a few days after the sudden creation of the
French Republic, M. Thiers precipitated himself on London. An account in
the newspapers described him as "accompanied by five ladies." Thus
gracefully escorted, he marched on the English capital. He had
interviews with Mr. Gladstone, Lord Granville, the French Ambassador,
and divers other great personages. He was always rushing from diplomatic
office to office. He "interviewed" everybody in London who could by any
possibility be supposed capable of influencing in the slightest degree
the fortunes of France. He never for a moment stopped talking. Great men
excel each other in various qualities; but there never was a great man
who could talk against M. Thiers. He could have shut up the late Lord
Macaulay in no time; and I doubt whether Mr. Seward could have contrived
to edge in a word while Thiers was in the same room. M. Thiers stayed in
London little more than two days. He arrived, I think, on a Wednesday
night, and left on the following Saturday. During that time he managed
to do all the interviewing, and was likewise able to take his family to
see the paintings in the National Gallery, where he was to be observed
keenly eyeing the pictures, and eloquently laying down critical law and
gospel on their merits, as if he had come over on a little autumnal
holiday from a settled and peaceful country, which no longer needed
looking after. Then he started from London in a steam-yacht, cruised
about the North Sea and the Baltic, dropped in upon the King of
Denmark, sounded the views of Sweden, collected the general opinion of
Finland, visited the Emperor of Russia and talked him into
semi-bewilderment, and then travelled down by land to Vienna, where he
used all his powers of persuasion on the Emperor Francis Joseph, and to
Florence, where by the sheer force of argument and fluency he drove
Victor Emanuel nearly out of his senses. Since that time, he all but
concluded an armistice with Bismarck, and when last I heard of him
(previous to this writing) he was, as I have said, going on a mission
somewhere in a balloon.
During his recent diplomatic flights, M. Thiers constantly offered to
encounter much greater fatigues and responsibilities if needful. He was
ready to go anywhere and talk to anybody. He would have hunted up the
Emperor of China or the Mikado of Japan, if either sovereign seemed in
the remotest degree likely to intervene on the side of France. I believe
I can say with confidence, that at the outset of his expedition he had
no official authority or mission whatever from the Provisional
Government. He told Jules Favre and the rest that he was about to start
on a tour of inspection round the European cabinets, and that they had
better let him try what he could do; and they did not refuse to let him
try, and it would not have mattered in the least whether they refused or
not. He came, in the first instance, altogether "on his own hook."
Perhaps, at first, the Republican Government was not very anxious to
accept the services of M. Thiers as a messenger of peace. No living
Frenchman had done half so much to bring about the state of national
feeling which enabled Louis Napoleon to precipitate the nation into a
war against Prussia. Perhaps they thought the man whose bitterest
complaint against the Emperor was that he failed to take advantage of
the chance of crushing Prussia in 1866, was not the most likely emissary
to conciliate victorious Prussia in 1870. But Thiers was determined to
make himself useful, and the Republican Government had to give in at
last, and concede some sort of official authority to him. Like the young
lady who said she married the importunate suitor to get rid of him,
Jules Favre and his colleagues probably accepted M. Thiers for their
spokesman as the only way of escaping from his eloquence. His mission
was heroic and patriotic, or egotistical and fussy, just as you are
pleased to regard it. In certain lights Cardinal Richelieu looks
wonderfully like Bottom the weaver. But it is impossible not to admire
the energy and courage of the irrepressible, inexhaustible,
fragile-looking, shabby old Orleanist. Thiers does not seem a personage
capable of enduring fatigue. He appears a sapless, withered, wasted old
creature. But the restless, fiery, exuberant, egotistical energy which
carried him along so far and so fast in life, has apparently gained
rather than lost in strength and resource during the forty years which
have elapsed since the subject of this sketch, then editor of the
"National," drew up in Paris the famous protest against the five
infamous _ordonnances_ of Charles the Tenth, and thus sounded the
prelude to the Revolution of July.
It must have been no common stock of self-possession and
self-complacency which enabled M. Thiers to present himself before the
great Prussian Chancellor as a messenger of peace. Bismarck, who has a
happy knack of apt Shakespearian quotation, might have accosted him in
the words of Beatrice and said, "This is a man's office, but not yours."
For M. Thiers, throughout his whole career, devoted his brilliant gifts
to the promotion of that spirit of narrow national vainglory which of
late years has made France dreaded and detested in Germany. M. Thiers is
like AEsop's trumpeter--guilty not of making war himself, but of blowing
the blasts which set other men fighting. The very speech in which he
protested last summer against the war initiated by the Imperial
Government, was inspired by a principle more immoral, and more
calculated to inflame Germany with resentment, than the very declaration
of war itself. For Thiers only condemned the war on the ground that
France was not properly prepared to crush Germany; that she had lost her
opportunity by not falling on Prussia while the latter was in the
death-grapple with Austria in 1866; and that as France had not done the
thing at the right time, she had better not run the risk of doing it
incompletely, by making the effort at an inopportune moment.
These considerations, however, did not trouble M. Thiers. He advanced to
meet Count von Bismarck with the easy confidence of one who feels that
he has a right to be treated as the best of friends and most appropriate
of envoys. If, immediately after the conclusion of the American war,
John Bright had been sent to Washington by England to endeavor to settle
the Alabama dispute, he probably would not have approached the President
with anything like the confident assurance of a genial welcome which
inspired M. Thiers when he offered himself as a messenger to the
Prussian statesman. This very sublimity of egotism is, and always was,
one of the sources of the success of M. Thiers. No man could with more
perfect composure and self-satisfaction dare to be inconsistent. His was
the very audacity and Quixotism of inconsistency. In office to-day, he
could advocate and enforce the very measures of repression which
yesterday, out of office, he was the foremost to denounce--nay, which he
obtained office by opposing and denouncing. He whose energetic action in
protesting against the celebrated five _ordonnances_ of Charles the
Tenth did so much to bring about the Revolution of July, was himself the
chief official author of the equally celebrated "laws of September,"
introduced in Louis Philippe's reign, which might have suited the
administration of a Peter the Great, or any other uncompromising despot.
In practical politics, of course, almost every minister is occasionally
compelled by the force of circumstances to do things which bear a
considerable resemblance to acts warmly condemned by him while he sat in
opposition. But M. Thiers invariably, when in power, exhibited himself
as the author and champion of principles and policy which he had
denounced with all the force of his eloquent tongue when he was the
opponent of the Government. He seemed in fact to be two men rather than
one, so entirely did Thiers in office contrast with Thiers in
opposition. But Thiers himself never appeared conscious of
inconsistency. Indeed, he was always consistent with his one grand
essential principle and creed--faith in the inspiration and the destiny
of M. Thiers.